Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘quest’

You know what feature would be good to have in the Dungeon Finder?

The ability to remove some heroic dungeons from your random list, to exclude them from the options so you don’t have to worry about going somewhere you don’t want to without the hassle and terrible rudeness of dropping from a formed group because you don’t like where you are going.

Maybe you plain don’t like the instance, maybe you are sick of running a particular one, or maybe you just feel that – whatever your gear score is – you don’t have the gear or skills or experience to handle them.

My baby priest Jools have been running a few heroics lately through the random dungeon finder and it has been going ok, despite my attempts of trying to water shield her and dropping totems and earh shielding tanks (fallout from having raided almost exclusively with my resto shammy the last few months).

And then one day I decided I wanted to go see the new ICC instances, so I selected normal Forge of Souls and went for it.

Was a bit worried first when I saw that the tank had 23 k health but I told myself I should drop my snobbish attitude and remember that it was a normal run, and that I hadn’t had much more health when I tanked my first Naxx with my furry bear.

Both my snobbish attidtude and my worries evaporated when we entered the instance and the tank swapped to his tank spec and tank gear though, and he doubled up his hp to land on 46 k health when buffed.

Rushed through it but it went ok, the Jaina quest completed so I followed the group through the portal to the normal Pit of Saron, which was a bit harder but we managed to rush through that one ok too.

Since I hadn’t read the quest text I didn’t realise until the end that killing the bosses in the Pit was not enough to complete the quest that would open up the portal to the next dungeon, so I thanked the party for the runs and left the group.

I dared venture in there later and it took me a few runs more through normal Pit of Saron to get the quest done, since apparently the one NPC you need to talk to is killed in mid-run! But I had a nice group which didn’t mind going through the Pit again so I could talk to him before the dragon lady blasted him away, and then we entered the normal Halls of Reflection. More difficult that PoS, but I was out of combat long enough between the waves to have time to ress and heal up anyone who died, and I didn’t lose anyone on the entire run from the Lich King.

Yay, now I was eligible for all the three new IIC dungeons!

The silver cloud soon turned out to have a dark lining though – I was now eligible to enter all the three new ICC instances…

Next time I chose a random heroic to get some badges I got ported into – heroic Pit of Saron…

Now, I did manage to keep people alive (mostly) through the normal one but it was no piece of cake playing with one hand while alt-tabbing out to watch other stuff and reading a book at the same time, it was pretty damned hard work for me to spread the heals and the fortunes and keep me and my party alive, so I was not looking forward to do it on heroic.

And it was pretty damned harder on heroic.

The first boss went down but so did three of the party including me – the retadin and the elemental shammy and the other two couldnt ress – so me and the shammy corpse ran while the retadin lay dead and demanded a ress when we got back.

The pulls were fast but flowing, the tank was considerate and although I had my work cut out for me I had fun too. The only grain in the cup of joy was the retadin actually, who barely had time to keel over before he demanded a ress.

The second boss was dealt with as well and although I kicked the bucket the shaman didn’t and could ress me to save me a corpse run.

We wiped three times on the multi mob packs on the way up to the ice tunnel, and every time the retadin stayed safe and snuggled on the ground while the rest of us ran back. I kept quiet about it because I was in no mood for arguing.

And then, with two packs down and the third reduced to three or four melee mobs, the retadin decides he needs to help me heal! Now, after having gotten the hard packs down and we are home free, now he decides he is going to help heal.

Those last mobs took some time to get down due to the lack of dps but at least none in the party had a health going under 95% at any time.

I was not so much annoyed at him as curious as to why he was doing it, but then the tank told him to get back into ret and start dps’ing again.

The rest of the run went without a hickup of any kind, and in summary it as an ok run. The people were not mean or uber, the tank looked out for me, the general attutude of the people was that “shit happens”, the retadin was a bit weird and I generally don’t like people who demands resses, but otherwise there were no major drawbacks.

And the last boss even dropped a pair of epic boots for Jools! She could finally replace her old worn blue footwear!

But I don’t want to do it again.

Not anytime soon at least, not being so rusty healing with a priest, and not in the kind of gear she has at the moment.

I am having fun in the random groups but I do need to work a lot for it, and  I don’t want to risk getting a rotten apple from the basket and end up in some horrible group like those most people seem to encounter in these dungeons where I feel I might be out of my league.

Doing the Jaina quests on normal unlocked the ICC heroic dungeons for my priest, and apparently the game thinks she is good enough geared to do them, but I simply don’t feel confident enough to do it.

Since I can’t undo the quest, I guess my only option to be sure I will not get an ICC as a random is to choose selected dungeons and check everyone but the ICC ones. I won’t get any frost emblems, but at least I’ll get the Triumph ones from the boss kills.

Hopefully she’ll be ready to do some serious rocking soon, but until then it would just have been easier if I could just check the ones I didn’t want to see on my random runs.

One of my side projects lately have been exploring the DK starter area and the quest lines on my new DK Tessy (yes that is Tessy the Rogue, chief and undisputed leader of all my WoW chars, reborn as a Death Knight).

While many of the quests are of a repulsive nature there is one where you have to gather five ghouls and return them to Gothik the Harvester. You aquire the ghouls by unleashing a device on the poor miners inside the Havenshire mine, which turns them into ghouls.

But somehow, they don’t seem too upset about it.

Just look at that ghoul, just transformed from a living hard-working Scarlet miner into an undead abomination, and he looks at me with the happiest face ever and exclaims Mama!

Isn’t he the cutest ghoul ever?

As a stark contrast to the hilarious murloc quest in my previous post, I have to tell you about the most nauseating quest I have ever encountered in this game.

No, I am not talking about the quest where you feed the wolves in the Scalding Pools some not-too-healthy-meat to make them sit and shit and then you have to look through their droppings to collect the microfilms they have apparently been eating.

I am talking about a quest chain that the Dalaran people in Amber Ledge gives you. You have to capture a Beryl Sorcerer and drag him in chains back to the mages in the tower. For the next part, you talk to Librarian Normantis, hiding inside the tower with the captured mage chained to a chair next to him.

You know, there is a famous psychology experiment from the 1960’s, led by psychologist Stanley Milgram, followed up in many subsequent studies around the world, all with the same result.

In the experiment, volunteers were helping Milgram with a study of memory and learning in different situations

The experiment paired people and one of the volunteers, “the teacher” was asking the other, “the learner”, questions. Failure to respond properly resulted in a electric shock delivered to the learner by the teacher. For every wrong answer the voltage was increased. As the learner experienced more and more painful shocks they started asking for the experiment to stop and to be released, sometimes even saying they had a heart condition, or crying and screaming for the teacher to stop asking questions and stop administering shocks.

If the volunteer teacher asked the psychologist experiment leader that they be allowed to stop hurting the learner they were invariably told to go on and increase the shock voltage for every wrong answer, no matter how much the learner was begging for release.

I know what you think now, you think most people chucked the shocker at the psychologist and went to check on the learner, especially after they heard the screaming or learned about the heart conditions.

Well, think again.

65 % of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock. 65 % of all the learners were going ahead with the painful treatment of another human on no more solid ground than “the psychologist told me to keep going. Many were uncomfortable doing it, even crying, and begging the psychologist to let them stop, but they kept going at the psychologist’s urging.

Now, there was a trick to this experiment. There were no electric shocks and “the learner” was in reality a paid actor. The experiment was not about memory and learning, it was about people’s willingness to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

It’s a interesting and rather discomforting read, read more about if you are interested.

Anyways, back to WoW and the quest I was telling you about.

Apparently, the mage you just captured hold some very valuable information as to where Lady Evanor, some Kirin Tor bigshot wizard, is being held but he won’t tell this to Normantis, the quest NPC and some other Kirin Tor bigshot. Normantis scornfully says that “Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain ‘extreme’ measures – even in desperate times such as these” but me, Paynne, an outsider is not bound by such restrictions and can take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information”, so he hands me a Neural Needler and tells me to do what I must while he sorts out the bookshelves.

Eh, use a Neural Needler to force someone to talk? Sounds an awful lot like torture to me.

And torture it is.

I was actually pretty reluctant to do this quest, but I told myself it’s a game, it’s pixels, and I want to do all the quests here! I want to level!

So I use the Neural Needler on the mage. Not once, not twice, but it takes four times before the interrogation is complete and he tells me what I want to know. He is cocky at first but at the end he begs for mercy and pleads with me to stop.

Zap Needler – Aaargh! Do your worst, warlock! I’ll tell you NOTHING!

And zap again – Aahhhh! Release me! I am of no use to you, I swear it!

And again – Stop! I beg you, please stop! Please…

And again – Alright! And he spills the beans to me and tells me where the lady wizard is.

So I go rescue the Kirin Tor mage from her arcane prison with a very foul taste in my mouth and images of Abu Ghraib and My Lai flashing through my head – I was only doing a quest! I was only following orders! I was only obeying the authorities and not following my own gut feeling as to what is right and what is wrong!

Yes, I know it’s a game and not “for real”, I know it’s only pixels, I know I have no qualms about killing off a whole camp of defias thugs or ogres or murlocs or whatever to complete a quest. Their shouts of “You no take mushroom” or mrlrlrlllgglglglg does not affect me the way this captured mage’s pleas does.

And why is that? Killing stuff in this game is fun, it’s fun being evil (muahahaha!) and destroy things and wreak havoc on the enemies! But torture, even torture of pixels, is NOT fun. The peon whacking and booterang throwingare pretty fun, but this one is nauseating.

As a side note, why has Blizzard put a quest like this in the game? They have made it impossible to kill the children in the game, which seems to indicate that they have some kind of reservations about what is right and wrong in this game of wholesale violence and abundant killing sprees. So why put in a torture quest like this? Is this maybe part of an experiment like Milgram’s? Is Blizz (or someone else) interested in the completion rate of this quest too see how many of the players are willing to go through with something like this in a virtual world.

Maybe I’m silly, or maybe I am overreacting, but that is one quest I am not gonna do again on any of my girls. Even having done it once was too much actually and I feel pretty disgusted about it.

In Winterfin Village in Northern Borean Tundra there are a few quest chains available where you, among other things, have to free Murloc Tadpoles from cages held by nasty Murlocs under the evil influence of the huge mak’rura Claximus.

The quests themselves are pretty easy but sometimes annoying because you have to free 20 of these babies, not an easy task when the shore is crawling with people doing the very same quest, and the caged Tadpoles respawn is very slow.

However, as a guildie pointed out, the baby murlocs make such a cute sound when they are rescued and run around after you and the evil Murlocs have the coolest ability ever – the Demoralizing Mmmrrrggglll!

For the finishing quest in the chain, you get to borrow a Murloc Suit to trick the evil ones into believing you are one of them!

Dressed in this, you can perform many of the usual emotes and the Murloc dance is cooler than even the Moonkin one! Sadly sadly sadly though, this suit is only useable in Winterfin Village and Winterfin Caverns, so unless you plan to spend a lot of time there it’s no use keeping it :-(

But do take your time to try out the different emotes while disguised as a murloc!






Murloc dance ftw!

So, new daily quests have opened up, the second stage of the Shattered Sun Offensive. A new opportunity to travel around the world, get some gold, get some rep with this faction, and a wonderful chance to see people at their worst.

No, I am not talking about members of the opposite faction trying to kill you over a Mana Cell, most of the people I have encountered up there in Blade’s Edge seems to have been intent on finishing the quest as fast as possible and haven’t bothered with some world pvp.

I am talking about people like this guy I just encountered, a priest from one on the larger raid guilds on this server. (An aptly named guild it seems, if this guys behaviour is any indication).

Have you done the daily quest Intercepting the Mana Cells where you have to gather Mana Cells in Bash’ir Landing, Blade’s Edge Mountains? You fly up there, you kill an ethereal and get a Bash’ir Phasing Device which phases you into a shadowy version of the normal sunny cheery world.

It’s a bit dark and hazy and you don’t see who is moving around up there until you are pretty much on top of them.

Anyways, the Mana Cells you are gathering are lying scattered around on the ground, usually guarded by a Mana Wyrm that you have to kill before you can pick up the cell. I had just finished off a wyrm and was starting to pick up the cell when this alliance priest runs up next to me and tries to pick up the same cell.

Well, I was first, I got it, and he ran off somewhere else.

I spotted another cell further away and ran there to pick it up. It was guarded by a Mana Wyrm and just as I was getting closer I spotted the guy again, this time standing a bit away from the Mana Cell and its guardian Wyrm, waiting silently for me to engage the Wyrm so he could snag the cell. I figured he could have the cell but without me helping him get it, so I turned to go find another. Unfortunately I had been too close to the Wyrm so it attacked me.

And, surprise surprise, the leech immediately ran for the cell and picked it up. And, to make sure I knew it was no honest mistake on his side, some oh-I-didn’t-realise-you-were-up-here-doing-the-same-quest-moronic-attitude, he said “Hehe” as he did it.

Wtf is wrong with people like this? There are plenty of cells up there, you don’t spend many minutes doing the quest even if you have to kill a Mana Wyrm for every cell you take. This guy rather waited silently for me to engage the wyrm than kill it himself and get the cell – Jools am holy with gear from Kara and badges and I kill them easily – a priest from a guild that raids the Black Temple should have even less trouble with them. And still he preferred to be a total jerk and act like this? Sad and pitiful behaviour indeed.

Two minutes later I had finished my quest and flew off to do the next daily in Netherstorm.

Dizzie is now 850/12000 Revered with the Wintersabre Trainers!

She has unlocked the third quest, the Rampaging Giants, and done it once. I don’t see her doing it many more times though, since the ride down to the far south of Winterspring takes a while and you have to kill (at least) 8 lvl 59-60 Elite Giants. Easily doable solo for a lvl 61 Fury Warrior with some new green Outland gear sure, but it still takes a lot of time.

She has abandoned her first plan of only doing the Winterfall Intrusion quest, and does the Frostsaber Provisions quest as well. The drop rate of the quest items still suck, and the mobs themselves rarely drop anything useful, but killing them gives xp and it feels so much better to turn both the quests in and get 500 rep per visit to Rivern than running back and forth and just get 250.

Also, sometimes you have to wait for respawns of the Winterfall Shamans or Ursas because someone else has been there killing them, and you might as well have something useful to do while you wait.

An unforeseen bonus of killing bears and chimaeras for the Provisions quest was also that there are quite a few veins of Thorium around in Winterspring, which she never would have discovered taking the fastest route between the Winterfall Village and Frostsabre Rock all the time. Thanks to this, she has now managed to level her mining to 315 and her engineering to 325!

So, while there still is about 32 more hours of grind to do, it actually seems doable now!

Pretty pink tiger, here I come!

Related post: The most mind-numbing grind ever?

Do you know what this is?

This is a Frostaber Mount, purchasable by those who are Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers in Winterspring.

I just know Dizzie would look so cool on a mount like this, the pink and lavender stripes of the tiger matching her pink pigtails just beautifully.

As the avid readers know Dizzie went through the portal to Outland at the tender level of 58. She picked up some quests, set out to do them and died. And she died. And she died again. And again. Her aggro range seemed to cover all of Hellfire Peninsula and she could hardly take down one mob on her own, let alone two or more.

On closer inspection, her gear was perhaps not all that up to date, her pretty blue Knight’s Cloak of the Bear was for lvl 29, her cool Herod’s Shoulder for lvl 37, and so on.

I called out for help and my husband came to the rescue. With his help Dizzie managed to finish the quests, get some new green imba gear, double her HP and AP and ding 59 in about an hour and a half.

She headed back to the old world then, figuring she could do some easy questing there now that she was a little better equipped. She had a lot of unfinished quests in Winterspring, so she set course to the snowy north.

And there, surrounded by pink-purple hostile tigers, on a huge cliff shaped like an inverted fang, she found Rivern Frostwind, Wintersaber Trainer, and the Wintersaber Mounts. And she knew she just had to have one of those.

What can I say? A pink-haired girl’s gotta have a pink-furred mount, right? (Yeye I know it’s lavender, but it’s still pink-ish)

The only way to get rep with this small faction is to do the quests they offer. You start at 0/3000 Neutral and there is one quest available – Frostsaber Provisions. You have to kill Shardtooth bears for 5 Shardtooth Meat and Chillwind chimaeras for 5 Chillwind Meat. The droprate is horrendous, it must be something like 20%. The meats don’t drop unless you have the quest, and once you have the 5 meats required they don’t drop no more until you turn the q in and take it again. The mobs rarely drop anything useful but a lot of Big Bear Bones that won’t stack and thus takes a lot of space in your bags, and Dizzie is a miner/engineer and can’t skin the damn dead carcasses.

Anyways, this quest gives 250 rep per turn-in.

After having done the Frostsaber Provisions 6 times and reached 1500/3000 Neutral another quest opens up – Winterfall Intrusion. This quests asks you to kill 5 Shamans and 5 Ursas in the Winterfall village east of Everlook, it’s repeatable and gives 250 rep per turn-in.

If you have done the quest Winterfall Activity killing the Winterfall mobs will also give you rep with Timbermaw Hold.

By this time Dizzie had dinged 60 as well and flown off to Dun Morogh to get her a Swift Yellow Mechanostrider. The epic rider made the trips between Frostsaber Rock and Winterfall Village a little faster, and she was not as often thrown of her mount while trying to avoid the numerous mobs littering the area.

She skipped doing the Frostsaber Provisions q because of the bad droprate and concentrated on killing furbolgs. A completion of the Winterfall Intrusion quest can be done in about ten minutes if there are no other distractions or obstacles, like a thorium node that needs to be mined, bag space that needs to be freed, or having to wait around for respawns because someone else has killed the mobs you need.

Dizzie is currently at 1000/6000 Friendly and research shows that another quest that gives 350 rep will open up at Honored. However, that quest requires riding down to the south part of Winterspring to kill some elite giants there, and I think the rep grind it will be faster if I skip this. Will probably do it once in a while, just to alleviate the possible boredom of doing what was referred to as the most mind-numbingly grind ever found in WoW.

So, if I only do the furbolg-killing quest, ECT (estimated completion time) of the rep grind will be about 42 hours in total, 3 of which I have done, 38 of which I have left to do. If you think this is insane, consider that before TBC these quests only gave 50 rep per turn-in, making the ECT to something like 5 times longer, or about 200 hours.

Dizzie will also have the benefit of the better Outland gear she’s wearing and the increasing level difference between her and the mobs will make them easier to kill or avoid, so it won’t be too bad I think. I hope.

I don’t have to worry about gearing her up either since a sweet friend gave her a surprise gift consisting of the full Fel Iron set, complete with two Fel Iron Hatchets, enchanted with Fiery Weapon, for her Dual Wield.

This is a grind best done while watching Lost or some other TV-show (laptop ftw!) to avoid death by acute boredom or broken windows from the computer-hurled-through-it-syndrome and I will definitely try to do it while rested so she at least gets some xp out of it.

These 152 quest turn-ins I have left to do will give about 760 k xp (1 520 mobs x ~500 xp/mob rested bonus) which will mean that Dizzie will get her pretty pink tiger at about level 62.

And then she will be as ready for Outland as she can be!

(As a curiosity, the Winterspring Frostsaber seems to be the only epic land mount that only requires 70 riding skill.)